SOURCE: "Worshipping Literature," in Nation, Vol. 265, No. 14, November 3, 1997, pp. 34-5, 38.

[In the following review, Scott provides a commendatory analysis of God and the American Writer.]

On the last page of New York Jew (1978), the third installment in Alfred Kazin's account of his life's journey from the slums of Brownsville to the slopes of Parnassus, the author finds himself at a literary party high above Lincoln Center. Across the Hudson, on the shores of New Jersey, a fire rages. It is sometime in the seventies, the era of the New York fiscal crisis and of general urban decay, and the flames impart an aura of apocalypse, an intimation that the last days are at hand. Amid cocktail-party chatter that could come from a Woody Allen soundtrack ("people arguing about movie reviews, Lina Wertmuller, the 'neurotic guilt of survivors'"), Kazin looks out at the burning sky and thinks about grander...